name nuisance

i was reading someone's post today and in it, she said that her name gets messed up all the time. and i can totally relate because my name has been butchered all through my life.

my dad's name is sheridan. my mom's name is linda. they decided to get fancy and make a combo platter out of their names just for me. okay, i can say now that i think it's lovely, but as a kid, i did not appreciate it at all. almost everyone who saw it written, pronounced it wrong. and for those who knew how to say it, they couldn't spell it.

just so you all know, whether or not you ever wondered, it is pronounced just like marilyn, but with a SH. and i don't mean like you're telling marilyn to shut it.

it's rare that it's spelled by a first timer without a Y and i am frequently given bonus L's and N's. and i hardly ever get an S at the beginning, most often a C. and while we're talking about there being a C on the front, i've had a couple times where i was called char-leen. and i don't mean like charlene. there was definitely a CHar, as in charbroiled. i've been called cheryl, sharon, shirley, sherry, and many other raggedy combinations of wrongness. the only one i answer to is sheri because i used that to avoid some of the name drama for many years.

my husband's favorite butchery of my name came in the shape of shirley-lynn, and he likes to call me that sometimes, preferably with a very heavy southern accent.

sigh. . .  that brings me to part of the reason i picked the name brooke when i was pregnant. no adults pronounce it wrong and even though sometimes people leave off the mysterious E at the end, it's spelled right more often than not. and even when kids get it wrong, it's not usually worse than book, broke or sometimes brick. it's okay though, when other kids say her name wrong, she just makes up a new name for them. like her friend joey, she calls him bob the builder.